Prior art peer-to-peer file sharing software/networks, also known as P2P, enable a community of peer client users, such as PCs or Set Top Boxes (STB), to share video or audio files via the Internet. These prior art file sharing systems are incapable of delivering Video On Demand (VoD) since they cannot support quick streaming of the content.
Other prior art related systems are known as peer-assisted broadcasting trees, in which every participating peer is broadcasting the stream to other peers; this results in a broadcasting streaming system that, among other things, is incapable of supporting VoD that requires a unique stream per viewer.
P2P distributed file sharing, where pieces of a file are widely distributed across a number of peers, is known in the art. Whenever a client requests a download of such a file, the request is serviced from a plurality of peers rather than directly from the server. For example, one such scheme, referred to as “Swarmcast,” spreads the load placed on a web site offering popular downloadable content by breaking files into much smaller pieces. Once a user has installed the Swarmcast client program, his computer automatically cooperate with other users' computers by passing around pieces of data that the users have already downloaded, thereby reducing the overall serving load on the central server. A similar scheme, referred to as “BitTorrent,” works along similar principles. In particular, when under low load, a web site which serves large files using the BitTorrent scheme will behave much like a typical http server since it performs most of the serving itself. However, when the server load reaches some relatively high level, BitTorrent will shift to a state where most of the upload burden is borne by the downloading clients themselves, which service other downloading clients.
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